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I think the ransom is that people have been using Photobucket to host images posted on forums for 10+ years, often hotlinked. Suddenly all of those historical
by tedmiston 9y ago
I think the ransom is that people have been using Photobucket to host images posted on forums for 10+ years, often hotlinked. Suddenly all of those historical hotlinks are going to break unless each user pays $400/year.
Changing the terms is one thing, but I think OP is upset that old images aren't grandfathered.
Also, I know one obvious solution is to just move all of one's images to a new host and edit the posts, but not all forums allow editing very old posts, some threads will be locked, etc.
- pc86 9y agoIf the issue is that the traffic costs money, grandfathering old images doesn't solve the root problem.
- tedmiston 9y agoYou're right, it doesn't, and the bandwidth of image hosting at that scale clearly costs someone real dollars. It's hard to imagine a good solution to the hotlinked historical images problem. Maybe a futureproof one is to maintain one's one domain with image urls that redirect to the user's current host. I think this is the best approach for book publishers. It's always frustrating to read references to blog posts etc from a book more than a few years old and then find the links are broken from a third party not maintaining the domain or changing it. Link rot is a real problem we don't talk about much.